


The Heart Lies in the Eyes

by Sroloc_Elbisivni



Series: there was naught before remembrance was [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - Atlantis: The Lost Empire Fusion, F/M, Fake Marriage, Linguistics, Marriage of Convenience, in which york and carolina are both milo thatch and they got married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:32:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8968837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/pseuds/Sroloc_Elbisivni
Summary: “I have a proposal for you.”“Weeeell, you should really know that I’m not the marrying type.”"That's exactly why I'm asking you."York is a graduate student feuding with the university's librarian over access to rare Icelandic texts. He can't exactly tell her why he needs them, because he's pretty sure chasing legends isn't something graduate students hoping to be offered jobs should do.He's also pretty sure that falling in love with your wife is something that usually happens BEFORE marriage.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hinn_Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/gifts).



> So I posted this [on Tumblr](http://sroloc--elbisivni.tumblr.com/post/154272054739/red-vs-blue-the-heart-lies-in-the-eyes) a while back and then forgot it existed. But now, here it is!
> 
> A while back, Steph did a stream of the movie "Atlantis: the Lost Empire" and someone had to go and say "Red vs. Blue au" and it was all downhill from there. Whether the full movie AU will ever be written out is somewhat up in the air, but it’s worth noting that it involves York and Carolina as an academic power couple sharing translation duties.
> 
> And then I had to say “ "platonic" marriage of convenience where Carolina proposes to York to get her father off her back and when they tell the story no one believes it because they’re ridiculously in love and affectionate with each other on the expedition” on skype
> 
> and then I had to write it. enjoy.

“I have a proposal for you.”

York sat up and stretched from where he’d been bent over the Icelandic text on the desk. It had been worth venturing into the archives to find the runic translations he was looking for. “Weeeell, you should really know that I’m not the marrying type.” He chuckled at his own joke.

The librarian, Miss Church, let out a huff of air that sent wisps of her red hair ruffling around her face. “That’s exactly why I’m asking you.”

“Asking me to what?”

“Marry me.”

York hit the floor hard enough for the chair back to knock the wind out of him.

“Sorry,” he choked out, catching his breath. “ _What_?”

* * *

They moved their discussion to the library’s staff room, over two cups of coffee. Miss Church had to smack the pot a couple of times before it would cooperate, but eventually they both had battered mugs in front of them on the table and she explained her thinking further.

“My fath–my family is exerting pressure on me to come home and get married. To their way of thinking, a daughter of the house is an old maid if she hasn’t been wed before the age of twenty-five. I have little interest in being mewed up in some mansion somewhere, moldering away one tea party at a time.” The side of her lip curled down in disgust. “I’m aware that you were passed over for a position because some members of the board believed your own single state deems you flighty and immature.”

York’s hands gripped his coffee tighter, just for something to do. “So your solution to both of our problems is for us to get married?”

“A marriage of convenience _only_.” She took a sip of her coffee, and her eyes were very, very green over the rim. “If at any time you wish to marry someone else, I can handle a divorce.”

“Keep your voice down,” York hissed. Anyone could walk by the open door, and academics gossiped worse than crows.

She rolled her eyes and switched to flawless Latin. _“As I said, I would be fine with divorce. For the present, it would give to me some needed leeway and to you a reputation for stability. We can live as roommates, and combine our incomes.”_

 _“I have a cat,”_ York protested, scrambling to translate.

_“I enjoy cats.”_

_“What happens if we have a disagreement?”_

Miss Church produced a piece of paper and a fountain pen. _“A before-marriage agreement.”_

York could admire her preparedness. He could also see the advantages the arrangement would have. But–

 _“I don’t even know your–not-family name!”_ And he knew he was off-balance–he couldn’t even remember the Latin word for “first.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Carolina.”

And that was that.

* * *

They took three weeks to iron out the details, arrange housing, and acquire rings, and York found that he truly enjoyed talking to Miss–to Carolina. He had always enjoyed their verbal sparring, but the actual conversations they now held were enjoyable as well.

The verbal sparring continued, of course. It seemed that the two of them couldn’t go a day without at least one argument, whether it be the advantages of Modern Greek over Homeric or the correct interpretation of the Rosetta Stone or the validity of hieroglyphs or the preferences of York’s cat.

York had never had such a delightful relationship before.

By the time they went to the courthouse, they had settled into an almost comfortable rhythm. Carolina didn’t object to taking his last name, and when he asked if she was sure, she had merely shrugged.

“It will be expected. And the name I have now isn’t even mine; it’s my father’s, and I am not sorry to cut that tie to him.”

And then, of course, came the reading of the vows.

York knew perfectly well that Carolina would rather deck him in the face, even now, rather than swear to “honor and obey.”

But it seemed she had thought of that as well, as she asked the judge if it would be permissible to make her vows in her mother’s tongue. The judge, being affable enough, agreed.

Carolina smiled directly at him, bright and beautiful in a way that made the green of her eyes nearly glow, and said in perfect Gaelic, _“Your refusal to accept that language’s advancement could be for the better and that Homer is a dusty old cow is childish and irritating, and your habit of speaking Italian through your nose ruins the poetry of the language.”_

York had heard many men talk of falling in love with their wives anew on their wedding day, and how it had been a magical and wonderful experience.

Here, falling in love in a moment snatched before his first lecture of the day, wearing his rather dusty best suit with patched elbows while staring at the splatter of ink on Carolina’s nose, all he could think was in how much trouble he was.

* * *

Their marriage was, for the most part, uneventfully received by their colleagues. Neither of them were historically prone to displays, and the explanation that a quiet courtship had led to a quiet marriage was generally accepted.

It probably helped, York reflected, that neither of them had much of a personal life to speak of. No one at the university could really say that they hadn’t been courting before, because no one knew either of them well enough to cry foul on their story.

Things proceeded much as they had for a week, with the two of them sharing the apartment and meals and going to separate bedrooms at night. They continued to argue over anything and everything that came to hand.

And then, by the end of a week, Carolina’s demeanor abruptly changed.

She grew more distant, stopped griping about his smoking, and retreated earlier in the evenings. When he asked her about it, first casually, and then more aggressively in the hopes of sparking a reaction, he had no luck.

His wracking his brain while he was supposed to be grading papers did not go unnoticed.

“Marital troubles already? Toldja you should have sprung for the honeymoon, son.” Professor Harold dumped his bag on the table.

“Not on my salary,” York responded automatically. It was a simple story that had the advantage of being true.

Harold hummed. “Tell you what, in my many years of experience, there’s no situation that can be made _worse_ with flowers.”

York blinked. The professor was assuming of course, but…

* * *

“Let me get this straight,” the man behind the florist’s counter said, slowly. “You want to purchase one sunflower.”

York nodded. “Broke graduate student,” he explained, cheerfully.

“And who’s this for again?”

“My wife.”

The man stared at him some more, then rubbed the scarred bridge of his nose. York absently wondered why a florist would have scars that looked like shrapnel. “Fine. I just hope for your sake you have somewhere else to sleep tonight.”

* * *

“What’s this?”

York looked up to see Carolina discovered the sunflower in a vase on the table.

“It’s a sunflower. _Helianthus annus.”_

“Why?”

“I just wanted to get you a flower.”

Carolina stared at the flower, at him, and back at the flower again. “…oh.”

“Do you want some dinner?”

“I’m…not hungry.” She went into her room and shut the door. Delta leapt up on the table, sniffed at the sunflower, and then dismissed it entirely, curling up on top of the books Carolina had uncharacteristically abandoned on the table.

The next day, York bought a black-eyed Susan.

* * *

The flower-giving went on for months, even if York occasionally had to resort to plucking dandelions from front lawns in the last days before his stipend was paid. Carolina rolled her eyes even more on those days, but she saved them to the vase regardless.

Things proceeded as normal. They caught the streetcar to the university together in the mornings and walked home at night. Delta developed a habit of going to bed with Carolina and relocating onto York’s stomach in the middle of the night. Carolina shelved books quietly in whatever section York happened to be working in and aggressively everywhere else when she wasn’t making hapless food-bearing undergraduates fear for their lives. York graded more papers than was probably healthy and despaired over the decline of the English language, let alone ancient ones. In his free time, he continued doing deeper and deeper research into the puzzle of Atlantis.

He made sure to keep it out of Carolina’s way, since he knew very well that the only reason she wasn’t in the graduate program herself—or already through it and striking fear into the hearts of students as a professor—was the issue of her sex. She was more than knowledgeable enough to judge him severely for serious research into a topic most of his colleagues considered fantasy.

One Friday, Carolina mentioned she’d be staying late at the library and encouraged him to go home anyways. York agreed, and after swinging by the flower shop to pick up a single delicate sprig of heather, he took the opportunity to spread out his materials on the kitchen table, setting aside an unimportant sheaf of papers for the cat to nap on.

He’d been making some progress on a translation of traveler’s accounts from the twelfth-century Ottoman Empire, because he thought a certain passage from a spice merchant who had traveled to North Ireland could hold a clue to a lost Viking ship.

He was getting closer, he knew it. It was just difficult to find materials from Northern Europe from the early second millennium in the first place, much less corroborating ones. He wanted to make sure he had confirmation that there had been a ship going missing in the first place before he tried to find records of the ship itself.

He was so caught up in parsing through the antique Arabic that he didn’t notice when the door of the apartment opened.

“York?”

York flinched, violently, and had to catch the ink bottle before it could tip. “Dammit,” he muttered, blotting at the splotch on his notes while Delta’s tail twitched restlessly. “Good evening, Carolina.”

She leaned over his chair, peering at the Arabic, and he had to resist the urge to cover it. It was nothing with an obvious link to Atlantis. He could come up with an entirely plausible explana—

“Is this…” Carolina’s voice sounded faint as she stared at the page. “This is from Al-Jareeht’s _Recorded Tales.”_

“Is it?” York almost winced at how false his tone sounded and tried to surreptitiously slide his notes over the transcribed pages of Viking runes.

He wasn’t quite surreptitious enough. Carolina snatched at them, and stared.

“You—“ she stopped herself, and lowered the paper, carefully. “Are you—researching Atlantis?”

York, caught entirely off guard, could only stare. “How did you—“

Carolina practically ran into her room, coming out again less than half a minute later with a sheaf of papers, rifling through them as she moved.

When she reached the table, she pulled one out and slapped it down on the table.

It was a copy of the exact same transcribed runes, with various passages underlined and more than one rune marked in red ink. A small notation in Dutch at the side of the page translated to _check translation._ The next piece of paper was the same passage from Al-Jahreet he had been looking at, with similar underlined parts, and the next was a new set of transcribed and notated runes, and York picked it up to read with shaking hands.

Carolina’s neat handwriting formed notes at the bottom of the page.

_Journal. Same one mentioned in the illuminated text? Different? A copy, same information? Location provided. Proof of Viking raid, Herford Abbey records. Multiple texts missing._

“You–” York set the pages down, very delicately. “You’re researching Atlantis too?”

Carolina let out a broken laugh. “Only for half my life.”

“Well. Um.” York licked his lips. “You’ve got me beat there. I’ve only spent a third.”

Carolina stared at him, set the rest of her notes down very carefully and slowly, moved around the table, and then grabbed him down into a kiss.

York let himself get lost in the kiss for a long minute and then had to pull back, panting.

“Wait, wait–aren’t we moving a little quickly?”

Carolina was breathing hard herself, and her eyes were very, very green. “Do you want to stop?”

“Well, I–no, but–”

She ran her nails lightly up his arms, raising goosebumps. “We,” she murmured, leaning closer to his ears, “are _married_.” And then she kissed him again.

* * *

On Monday, York dropped by the flower shop on his way to the college and bought as an enormous a bouquet as his budget could stand, grinning widely. The scarred florist rolled his eyes.

* * *

By the time their first anniversary had rolled around, they had converted Carolina’s former bedroom into a library. Various books were scattered around on shelves; a shared desk was covered in papers with endless notations in twenty different languages. One corner of the desk had spare newspapers in a pile to keep Delta from trying to nap on relevant notes. There were no ashtrays, as Carolina had wheedled, argued, and generally discouraged York out of smoking not long after they began kissing regularly. On the wall, in a place of prominence, hung a large transcription of an excerpt from Plato’s _Timaeus_ in the original Greek that York had done as an anniversary present. Because it was their private office, and not one anyone else from the university would ever see, he had been able to make their shared favorite line the largest of all without fearing censure.

_In a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea._




**Author's Note:**

>  ~~for the record the answer to 'who seduces atlantian royalty' is 'both of them' because the king is Kimball and I love my leaky OT3 canoe~~  
>  Come talk to me on [ Tumblr](sroloc--elbisivni.tumblr.com) if you want to know more about this verse, or anything else really!


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